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Admin
The original article with the comments http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Biggest-BoonDongle-in-the-World.aspx
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Great story! WTF???
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What?! I can't believe this, I come in to work this week and what do I find, a freaking repeat! Some warning would have been nice to... oh wait, maybe I should read the beginning sometime.
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Telco Vendors are very license-happy.
As said, there's a massive, hideously expensive piece of hardware that is required to run the system at all, yet several PBX manufacturers require a dongle on the PBX itself to make sure licensing is right, too.
You'd also think that any business that considers phones a major tool for the business would be willing to spend money on them, but that's not really true.
However, consider that there is a huge grey market on PBX gear. This is mainly because if appears overpriced ("I'm paying how much for a processor card that uses a 486?!?") with some of the cost being because it's often barely past wire-wrapped assemblies for some components. Not much economy of scale. Customers are nickled and dimed for features and there's competition among the local sales & support vendors, some of whom may be willing to install a feature for a system from a company they're no longer 'officially' working with to make a fast buck, since they know they won't have to deal with it in a year when the maintenance contract gets moves to someone else.
Cisco grabbed a big chunk of this niche, and could've grabbed more, but their licensing has gone from cool to annoying as well, which hasn't helped matters or their bottom line. Hard to feel too much pity, though: Cisco's wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted.
Admin
I've seen this more than once in the scientific instrumentation field. They make you use a dongle to control your $50K spectrophotometer with their software.
I've even seen software I know to be based on open source stuff require a dongle to use with their extravagantly expensive things.
Then again the scientific instrumentation field is full of WTF's. We have another instrument that must be carefully walled off from the network because it can only run Windows XP Service Pack 2. The only communication between the instrument and the controlling computer is via a firewire connection. ANY standard Windows Firewire connection.
Admin
If companies could get an unlicensed copy of the hardware they'd do that as well.
Admin
Yea. I've seen that soo many times myself.
One mayor european vendor of MFC's (Mass flow controlers, a valve that controls the gas flow thorugh it) uses a special windows software for callibration and configuration and that software uses an USB dongle and the software is so crappy made that more than half the time spent configuring the MFC's is spent getting the frigging dongle to work with windows and/or the software. Even the supplier technicians has issues with that.
On top of that, each MFC cost comething like 1200$ and the software is useless for anything else.....
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to mars one day with a hammer
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We had a customer come to us asking if it was possible to use a computer to bulk update his cash register. He'd done it once before, and had the CD for the software... But of course he'd lost the little USB dongle. Around $400 bought him a new fresh license to run the software, so technically he now has 2 licenses for software to configure his 1 cash register (and only that model of cash register).
A different vendor we have dealt with simply provides the software for free (both on CD with the unit and on their website) and lists it as a feature on the features list.
(I should point out we're a computer place, not a POS place)
Admin
Dongles come with SDKs, right?
How will dongle makers protect their SDKs?
The answer is not the original dongle. After all, it's too easy for counterfeiters to make fake dongles. The answer isn't another dongle. It's too easy for counterfeiters to make those too.
The answer isn't a disk drive either. A few years ago I bought a disk drive. It came brand new in a sealed antistatic envelope. It had a printed label. (It was a notebook drive so your chances of guessing the alleged manufacturer are 33% not 50%. Also this was a drive itself, not an external USB case that could contain more easily faked components.) The serial number reported by the drive's firmware was the same as the serial number printed on the label. Smart tasks all passed. I tested a moderate amount of reading and writing files. I was just about to leave favourable feedback for the seller. Then I noticed something odd about the label. So I opened a browser to the web site of the alleged manufacturer, tried to get warranty information about the drive, and was told that the serial number was invalid. Looking more closely at the printed label, it was indeed fake. It took a while to get a refund, but I got it.
Admin
The biggest dongle is mine.
Oops... Well, at least I can't get fired for it, not like these poor peons: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got-two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/
Hmm, Akismet said that was spam, but if I add this sentence about Viagra then Akismet will accept it, right?
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The only actual good excuse for a dongle is if you're using software to limit features that are already in the hardware. Someone could buy the cheapest version and "upgrade" it for free. But then you could simply refuse to provide support. And you don't need some stupid dongle to do it, just an EEPROM with the list of enabled features for that hardware.
At the place where I work, we don't even turn on the protect bits in embedded CPU chips (that can be a pain in the ass if you have to upgrade already-assembled devices), and only our largest firmware even has any sort of obfuscation to hide text strings from easy viewing. 1: it's hard to run the code image without the hardware (and we don't do much if any feature hiding) 2: if a competitor wants to reverse engineer it from the object code, good luck.
Long ago back in the late '90s I updated a couple of US Robotics Courier modems using a hacked firmware from Russia that added a command to manipulate the feature control bits. I couldn't even get it to work until I went into DOS Debug and tweaked a delay loop. But this was the end of the modem era anyhow, and I already had a couple of Courier modems from their sysop promotion, and it was just a modem I had found cheap at a thrift store and bought because Courier modems were the most awesome modems of their day and shouldn't be left to rot among the winmodems.
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I should have said that if companies could get a free copy of a machine there's many places that would do it.
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i once worked for a semiconductor manufacturer, one of whose products was a smoke detector IC. the facilities manager and a shift supervisor (3rd shift, of course) took barrels of reject chips that were headed for gold reclamation from the plant, re-branded them, and sold them in Canada. we peons found out when suddenly there were a bunch of guys nobody had seen before interviewing people behind closed doors. turned out the buyers of the re-branded rejects called our sales reps demanding refunds, and when the rejects were examined, we discovered they were from reject lots.
the loss due to unwarranted refunds (doesn't seem too smart to pay up front before examining the parts, but i'm not a business guy, so what do i know ...) was over $1000000.00, but nobody was arrested for theft. seems that would have upset the shareholders.
Admin
Use commas.
Admin
Two months ago our IT people went the rounds with the vendor of a license server that needed to be installed for a seat-limited application.
After installing the license server in our data center, the server refused to run since it detected it was running in a VM.
The vendor informed us that we needed to dedicate a physical machine to running the server. Apparently they are very concerned that we might install the license server multiple times on separate networks, and so if we were to want to abuse our licenses, it would require us to leap through the insurmountable hurdles of either:
or
Truly, the company should be commended for their foolproof system.